This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Triesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Jamie Quattro read her story, Yogurt

Days, from the August 7, 2023 issue of the magazine.

Quattro is the author of the story collection I want to show you more, and the novel Fire

Sermon.

A new novel, two-step-devil, will be published next year.

Now here's Jamie Quattro.

Yogurt Days

The week I started middle school, my mother told me she would be late picking me up on Thursdays.

On Thursdays, she said, she would be taking Frozen Yogurt to Benjamin, a boy who's

family lived out near the Air Force Base.

I'd never met the boy, but had overheard my parents talking about him.

I gathered he was very sick, possibly dying.

Is it cancer, I asked?

Something like cancer, my mother said.

She said that Frozen Yogurt was one of the few things he liked that he could digest.

I guessed his mother couldn't leave him alone long enough to drive to our part of town

where the Yogurt shop was.

That my mother would cross Phoenix to bring Yogurt to a sick boy didn't surprise me.

She was always putting herself in the way of the sufferings of others.

When I was eight, a prostitute came to live in our pool house.

...